SOURCE: Berger, Doris L. “Poisonings.” Review of Politics 62, no. 2 (spring 2000): 365.

In the following review, Berger offers a positive assessment of My German Question.

Peter Gay's memoir [My German Question] will be welcomed by all who have admired his work over the past forty years. From his early studies of Eduard Bernstein (1958) and Voltaire (1959), to his essay on Weimar Culture (1968), his textbook on Modern Europe (1973, with R. K. Webb), and his many volumes on Freud and on The Bourgeois Experience (published from 1978 to 1998), Gay has had an enormous impact on how North Americans understand central and western Europe. This personal account offers a glimpse into some of the influences that shaped his own development, especially during his formative years in Germany. “This is not an autobiography,” Gay insists in the first line of the Preface: “it is a memoir that focuses on the six years, 1933 to 1939, I spent as...